Robert Pattinson played multiple roles of himself in the long-delayed new film Mickey 17 trailer.
The science fiction film features the 38-year-old Robert Pattinson heartthrob-turned-art house cinema icon playing multiple versions of a character named Mickey Barnes, while Mark Ruffalo, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette and Noami Ackie also star.
Mickey leaves Earth for the brighter pastures of interstellar colonization, agreeing to be an ‘expendable,’ a person who works dangerous jobs and has their body regrown and their consciousness transferred whenever they day.
But the goofy title character (the seventeenth version of the original Mickey) gets an unexpected surprise when he runs into another version of himself who has been simultaneously created, which threatens the survival of the entire Mickey line.
The film is directed by the acclaimed South Korean director Bong Joon-ho.
Bong is known for a string of now-classic Korean films, including the serial killer–thriller Memories Of murder, the monster movie The Host, and the suspense thriller Mother.
He made his English-language debut with 2013’s Snowpiercer, and he followed it up with the multilingual Okja in 2017, before scoring his biggest success to date with 2019’s Parasite.
The darkly comic thriller was a hit with critics and audiences alike, and it earned the Cannes Film Festival’s top honor, the Palme d’Or, before becoming the first non-English-language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture at the 92nd Academy Awards.
Parasite also scored Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay, along with Best International Feature.
The filmmaker appears to be leaning in to the dark comedy in Mickey 17, as the trailer focuses on Pattinson’s character’s numerous grisly deaths, most of which are played for laughs.
In the cold open, Mickey is introduced in a space suit as he performs maintenance on the exterior of a gigantic ship cruising through space.
But a moment of awe at the massive scale of the universe is interrupted when a bit of space debris hurtles past and slices Mickey’s hand off.
He watches the hand zoom away before the life slips from his eyes while colonists on the ship chat over coffee without even noticing the hand suspended outside a window.